Built by a mom who lived the cliff

I have an economics degree. I spent years thinking about the world through the lens of supply and demand, incentives and disincentives, rational actors making decisions inside the systems they're given. And then COVID hit, and I found myself on the other side of all those theories — my kids and I qualified for Medi-Cal, and I was no longer studying the poverty trap. I was living inside one.

I had been working in hospitality — an industry that didn't just slow down during the pandemic, it imploded. I was laid off from a job I loved and had worked hard for. The industry didn't fully recover, and that chapter closed in a way I hadn't chosen. My kids and I qualified for Medi-Cal. I had time, and I had an economics degree, and I started doing what economists do: running the numbers on the system I was suddenly inside.

As a parent, the math hit differently. It wasn't abstract. It was my kids' health coverage. I started running the numbers the way an economist would — what's the incentive here, where's the threshold, what does the system actually reward — and applied that lens to my own situation, my own income, my own family's eligibility.

The system isn't designed with malice. But it's designed with cliffs instead of slopes. And the people navigating those cliffs every day are not lazy, not irresponsible, not bad with money. They are rational actors responding to a system full of perverse incentives — exactly what any economist would predict.

What changed things for me was learning about MAGI — Modified Adjusted Gross Income. Pre-tax retirement contributions reduce the income number that benefits programs actually check. Not your paycheck. Not your gross income. Your MAGI. I contributed to a Traditional IRA. My MAGI dropped. My kids kept their Medi-Cal coverage.

I started contributing. My MAGI dropped. My kids kept their Medi-Cal coverage. And that money — instead of just disappearing into a system I didn't fully understand — started growing in an index fund. For the first time, I felt like I was participating in the same economy as everyone else, instead of choosing between earning and staying covered.

It didn't make me rich. But it gave me a foothold. Like I was building something, not just surviving. I kept checking my numbers and adjusting my IRA contribution as my situation shifted. That practice — repeated, unglamorous, and genuinely useful — was the actual strategy. I'm self-employed now, which brings its own version of the same challenge, and I use the same tools. The cliff looks a little different from this angle, but the math is the same.

I built this tool because nobody built it for me. Because I have an economics degree and I had to find this myself, mostly by accident. Because the families who need this information most are the ones least likely to have a financial advisor walking them through it.

If you're lucky enough to have an employer who offers a 401(k) — especially one with a match — that's worth knowing about too. A 401(k) contribution reduces your MAGI the same way a Traditional IRA does, and an employer match is genuinely free money on top of it. Most employers match somewhere between 3% and 6% of your salary, and leaving that on the table is leaving real money behind.

I'll also be honest: I actually find this stuff interesting. Tax deductions, MAGI calculations, the way a retirement contribution quietly reshapes an income number — I genuinely enjoy the mechanics of it. Most people don't, and I know this because I've mentioned spreadsheets at parties and watched the eyes glaze over in real time. That gap — between the people who find it fascinating and the people who just need it explained without the jargon — is exactly where this site lives.

This isn't charity. It's information. The kind that's been sitting in IRS tax code while the people who need it most are avoiding income or staying small just to protect their families.

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